Consumer Anxiety in China Undermines Government’s Economic Plans

BEIJING — In recent days, an advice column has circulated widely on China’s most popular social media phone app. Titled “Guide on Safe Passage Through the Economic Crisis,” it is aimed at young Chinese urban professionals. Its nuggets of wisdom include: “Work hard at your job so you are the last to be laid off” and “In an economic crisis, liquidity is the number one priority.”

Zhang Yuanyuan, 31, a bank teller in Shandong Province, is among the thousands of people who have shared it online.

“Last year we didn’t have any year-end galas or a bonus,” she said in an interview. “I think this year will be the same.”

“I try to spend less,” she said, adding that she now buys cheaper clothes online instead of shopping in high-end malls. “And I started car-pooling with co-workers to save on gas.”

Many young middle-class Chinese who grew up during the nation’s glittering boom years, when double-digit growth was the norm, are suddenly confronting the shadow of an economic slowdown, and even hints of austerity.

They are canceling vacations and delaying weddings and even selling recently purchased apartments to have cash on hand. Those who have lost money in the ongoing stock market crash are especially anxious.

Their angst poses dual problems for China’s leadership. The ruling party bases its legitimacy on delivering high rates of growth and employment. It also hopes to encourage consumer spending as a new engine of growth as the manufacturing sector slows and to nudge the economy away from an investment-driven model. Eroding confidence threatens both goals.

These days, Chinese are using the social media app WeChat to look for news and advice on the economy rather than the state news media, which, at the orders of the Communist Party’s propaganda department, have only had bare-bones reporting on the stock market crisis and the broader concerns over slowing economic growth.

Earlier this month, China’s central bank devalued the Chinese currency, the renminbi, by the largest amount in decades, signaling to outsiders that officials were worried about China’s growth rate, which the government had earlier projected at 7 percent for the year. Then the sharp drop in the Chinese stock market this week, following a steep midsummer fall that had been slowed only through muscular government intervention, destabilized stock markets worldwide.

Through censorship orders, Communist Party officials have been trying to blunt the dire news at home. Not only have the main party newspapers refrained from publishing relevant articles on their front pages, but security officials have shown a willingness to go after Chinese reporters whose stories deviate from the official narrative.

On Tuesday, a reporter for Caijing, a respected financial newsmagazine, was taken away by the police to “assist in the investigation of” fabricating and spreading false information on futures trading, according to Xinhua, the state news agency. Caijing had published an article on July 20 by the reporter, Wang Xiaolu, saying that China’s Securities Regulatory Commission was looking to withdraw funds from the turbulent stock market.

Despite Mr. Wang’s detention and a denial of the report from a commission representative, Caijing has kept the article online. The magazine released a statement saying it did not know why the police had detained Mr. Wang.

But censors have yet to prevent people from using search terms related to the economy or the stock market on social media networks, so discussion is thriving online.

“In the absence of information about the stock market on official media, Chinese investors are relying on social media, primarily the two ‘We’s — Weibo and WeChat — to get news about the economy,” said Xiao Qiang, founder of China Digital Times, which tracks China’s media censorship.

He noted that WeChat was particularly popular because it was less “polluted” by posts from government-supported Internet users and because people could easily share news articles on the economy from Western news publications, especially stories already translated into Chinese.

The author of the widely circulated financial advice column on WeChat, Lin Mo, once worked for a state-run business magazine, then started her own online writing about the economy. She said in an interview that she had published her latest list of suggestions after getting hundreds of messages from “very terrified” readers responding to one of her earlier essays on what she called an “economic crisis.”

“Many readers were asking me things like, ‘What should we do?’ and, ‘What if China becomes Japan in the ‘80s?’” she said. “They are in their early 30s — the age to buy apartments or make investments or start their own businesses. So they have big financial decisions to make, and in the current economy, they worry about losing those investments in the slowdown.”

“Many of them are at a place in their careers where they want to leverage their current positions for higher-paying positions, and they worry about getting laid off by the new company in the economic winter,” she added. “One reader told me that he left a state-owned travel agency to join a booming Internet-based travel service because he felt he had to ‘embrace the Internet’ as a young professional. Now he regrets that decision bitterly because the new company is having layoffs, and he might be laid off first.”

One Chinese woman who posted Ms. Lin’s column on her WeChat account said it “echoed the zeitgeist.” She had tried to sell an apartment, but said, “Now I think I might hold off until the market recovers a bit.”

Among the most worried are university graduates. This year, nearly 7.5 million people graduated from universities in China, a 3 percent increase over last year.

“The difficulty of finding employment in 2015 is still relatively high,” said Zhang Feng, director of the career center of the Ministry of Education, according to an article on the ministry’s news site. “Both the central and local economies’ growth rates have entered the ‘new normal.’”

Victor Shih, a political economist at the University of California, San Diego, said the slowdown exacerbated worrisome trends in the job market.

“Highly paid professional jobs have been scarce for several years now,” he said, “and many young graduates have depended on their parents’ connections to obtain entry positions in the government or state-owned enterprises. The current downturn will hit graduates without strong connections or specialized skills.”

Ms. Lin said China’s young strivers “worry about a decline in life quality. They worry about never getting that financial freedom they so badly want. They worry about never being able to retire early. They worry about never being able to start their own business.”

Leisure spending still exists, of course. Popular restaurants in Beijing are crowded. Earlier this month, groups of Chinese tourists snapped up all manner of luxury goods one weekend at Galeries Lafayette in Paris, a high-end destination. Tour groups shuffled through the alleys and luxury shops of Venice.

But on Zhihu, the Chinese equivalent of the question-and-answer website Quora, hundreds of people have submitted responses to questions from 2014 and 2015 that asked, “What things do you see in your profession that indicate an economic slowdown?” The answers this year have ranged from “I’m in sales — commission is impossible” to “I’m in construction. Last year we got four jobs and this year none. Layoffs have started.”

Gao Yike, 25, who works at a real estate company in the northeastern provincial capital of Harbin, said in a telephone interview that the project management department laid off employees in April. He said a growing number of midlevel and senior executives were leaving the real estate industry for technology companies, and that housing sales at his company were notably worse than last year.

“The golden age of the real estate market has come to an end,” he said.

Mr. Gao had also lost half of his initial investments in the stock market, and he said he now planned to spend less — for instance, trying to stay with friends rather than in hotels on a trip to the United States next month.

Ms. Fang, an employee of a freight shipping company in Beijing who asked to be identified only by her surname, said the entire shipping industry had been hit hard.

She said she and her husband still felt secure — her husband works at a state-owned company and “lives off the Communist Party’s money.” But Ms. Fang said she had stopped buying luxury goods and was “consciously preventing myself from buying things that are not necessities.”

Ms. Zhang, the bank teller in Jinan who had posted Lin Mo’s advice column, said there could be a silver lining in the upheaval.

“Maybe the economic slowdown is not such a bad thing,” she said. “There is less overtime work. If there is no point thinking about making money, we can think about things that don’t involve making money, like spending time with parents or reading a book.”

Mia Li and Vanessa Piao contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Fearing Slump, Rattled Chinese Long for Advice . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe